Congress Hears Strong Towns Ideas on Housing, Transportation
(Source: Unsplash/Elijah Mears.)
Strong Towns ideas made it to the U.S. Senate this month. In a hearing called “Housing Supply and Innovation,” the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs heard from a range of expert witnesses about the nation’s housing crisis. It included such terms as missing middle, accessory dwelling units, and zoning reform.
Even more exciting from a Strong Towns perspective, one of those witnesses was our newest board member, Gregory Good. Good is Chief Real Estate Officer and Director of Asset Management for Invest Newark, and he testified about his organization’s efforts to generate affordable housing in a city that’s several thousand units short and faces an enduring wealth gap.
Good told Congress that while groups such as his were pursuing local solutions, there was a broader issue for regulators and the industry to address: “Public and private financing incentivizes large-scale projects with high concentration of high-end units over small- to mid-size development at lower densities. Therefore, we don’t have homes where we need them at the price most Americans can afford.”
Senator Tina Smith (MN) cited statistics that reveal the scope of the challenges. In 2021, there was less housing for rent and for sale than at any point in the past 30 years, as construction has not kept up with the number of new households over the past decade. One in four renters paid more than 50% of their household income for housing. And at the low end of the housing scale, just 10% of homes in 2022 sold for less than $300,000—down from 41% in 2019. “Without a safe, affordable place to live, nothing else in your life works,” said Smith.
Smith, who chairs the Housing, Transportation and Community Development subcommittee, noted that the housing crisis is “not limited to one part of the country, it’s urban, suburban, and rural.” Underscoring that point, Senator Cynthia Lummis (WY) spoke about the challenges in her sparsely populated state, especially in resort areas such as Jackson, where local workers face long commutes to find affordable housing.
Smith also praised her home state for its leading role in zoning reform meant to spur construction of duplexes, triplexes, and ADUs, and noted the momentum for change in other states. Witness Janne Flisrand of Neighbors for More Neighbors, a Minneapolis-based housing organization, testified about the process that led to those reforms and the construction they’ve spurred, but also noted the limitations of local activism: “There is a role for national policy to incentivize these local changes, subsidize new homes, to stabilize construction boom and bust cycles, and to reimplement long-abandoned federal low-interest loan programs for affordable housing in urban and rural communities.”
Flisrand also noted that while her region had made strides in generating new housing supply, there was still a persistent racial and wealth gap in housing outcomes in Minnesota.
Also testifying about the challenges of local zoning was Eric Schaefer of Fading West, which operates a modular housing factory in Colorado. He says his firm can construct affordable, durable, single-family homes and multiplex units, but some local zoning rules forbid them, plus many funding programs for affordable housing exclude modular construction. He praised Colorado Governor Jared Polis for embracing modular housing, and cited a project his firm did in Eagle County with Habitat for Humanity, in which it was able to produce 16 worker homes for the cost of three that were originally budgeted. Among other advantages of modular construction, Schaefer testified, are streamlined construction approval and being able to do production year round in cold weather states where the work season is limited.
Underscoring the broad interest on these issues from federal policy makers, questions for the witnesses also came from Senators John Fetterman (PA), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), and Bob Menendez (NJ), who praised Good’s work in Newark and agreed the federal government needed to update and expand its role in generating housing supply to keep up with demand.
Strong Towns was excited to get a direct shout-out (and a citation in the Congressional Record) from Good, who told the subcommittee chair, “Senator Smith, you’ll be happy to note that Strong Towns of Minnesota is a great organization raising awareness for local, incremental change across our country.”
That wasn’t the only mention of Strong Towns in Congress this month. Speaking in favor of New York City’s efforts to toll cars for driving in certain areas at peak times, Representative Jake Auchincloss (MA) told the House, “Congestion pricing allows cities to accurately reflect the costs of having cars in dense areas. Strong Towns has pointed out that this is not just a reflection of the negative externalities of air pollution, traffic and emissions, but it also allows cities to price in the space that vehicles take up. Manhattan has limited space for car traffic and it should be allowed to reflect that scarcity through tolls.”
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.